A Quote by Gael Garcia Bernal
You know, Motorcycle Diaries has no incredible stories, no sudden plot twists, it doesn't play that way. It's about recognizing that instance of change and embracing it.
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The earliest influence on me was the movies of the thirties when I was growing up. Those were stories. If you look at them now, you see the development of character and the twists of plot; but essentially they told stories. My mother didn't go to the movies because of a religious promise she made early in her life, and I used to go to movies and come home and tell her the plots of those old Warner Brothers/James Cagney movies, the old romantic love stories. Through these movies that had real characters, I absorbed drama, sense of pacing, and plot.
You can only see 'Star Wars' for the first time once, and people are watching it again and again and again, and it's a testament to the strength beyond the plot twists that it has. The narrative strength that it has is that it can be enjoyed even though you know the biggest plot elements in it.
Fiction writers come up with some interesting metaphors when speaking of plot. Some say the plot is the highway and the characters are the automobiles. Others talk about stories that are "plot-driven," as if the plot were neither the highway nor the automobile, but the chauffeur. Others seem to have plot phobia and say they never plot. Still others turn up their noses at the very notion, as if there's something artificial, fraudulent, contrived.
That’s the thing about change. It can be gradual. Slow and almost unnoticeable. Or it can be sudden, and you don’t even know how you could’ve been any other way.
A lot of the stories I write about have an element of mystery. They're crime stories or conspiracy stories or quests. They do have built into them revelations and twists. But the revelations, to me, come from seeing history as it's unfolding, or life as it's unfolding.
Perhaps it's the people whose lives have taken sudden new twists - people who have learned to embrace the creative possibilities of change - who stand the best chance of penetrating life's mysteries.
There are people who have incredible stories that we don't talk about. People who did amazing things, men and women who faced incredible odds, and there's nothing wrong with them being heroes for once, you know?
I don't revise a lot when writing short stories. As far as the novel, I definitely thought more about plot. Honestly, I'm still pretty confused about what "plot" means. I've been reading some of my Goodreads reviews and one reader noted that the The Last Days of California "reads like a short story stretched to the breaking point, padded and brought into novel range..." I don't know what people want, really.
Most short stories have but one plot. The very best, however, have what I call a plot-and-a-half – that is, a main plot and a small subplot that feeds in a twist or an unexpected piece of business that ads crunch and flavor to the story as a whole.
Remember: Plot is no more than footprints left in the snow after your characters have run by on their way to incredible destinations. Plot is observed after the fact rather than before. It cannot precede action. It is the chart that remains when an action is through. That is all Plot ever should be. It is human desire let run, running, and reaching a goal. It cannot be mechanical. It can only be dynamic.
When we tell stories about things that are important - love, fear, beauty - we change the way people think about the world. Writers are, or should be, truth-tellers even when the stories themselves are fantasy.
Also, I knew that the impact of Motorcycle Diaries was going to be so resonant for all of us who went through the experience of making it that I didn't want to do anything that could reflect it.
The connection of the car to the driver is the seat. You are strapped in tightly in it. On the motorcycle, you can move around. The G-forces feel different. It's probably harder to change from the car to the motorcycle.
When I started 'Still Missing,' I had a few key plot points in mind, which I played around with mentally for a couple of months, then one day I just started writing. Not having an outline led to some cool plot twists, but also many rewrites! A lot of the plotting happened on subsequent drafts.
Everyone knows I am fast, so I have to change the way I play. I always know I have to change the way I score. Every game is different.
The Nigerian storyteller Ben Okri says that ‘In a fractured age, when cynicism is god, here is a possible heresy: we live by stories, we also live in them. One way or another we are living the stories planted in us early or along the way, or we are also living the stories we planted — knowingly or unknowingly — in ourselves. We live stories that either give our lives meaning or negate it with meaninglessness. If we change the stories we live by, quite possibly we change our lives.’
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